1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to searching computer databases, and more specifically, the invention relates to searching a collaborative document database.
2. Prior Art
In a collaborative document database system, there may be the concept of a logical document, where a parent document may have attached multiple children documents. Such systems do not usually store the data in these documents in a relational database. Instead, the documents are stored in a proprietary format and related documents may be only weakly linked or associated. Even though the data are not stored with the relational model, querying for individual documents is normally not a problem, as the document database system may be equipped with a full text search engine.
A problem may occur, however, when querying against a logical document as a whole. For example, a query may need to find all the criminal investigations where “John Doe” and “Tom Smith” were involved. With reference to FIG. 1, if “John Doe” was located in the data for Suspect 1 and “Tom Smith” was in the data contained by the Suspect 2 child document, the query would fail. It would not find the logical document that contained both of these suspects.